‘How to Win Friends & Influence People’
At first, Dale Carnegie was not interested in writing a book about leadership. According to Peter Schwed in the publishing history “Turning the Pages,” the erstwhile Missouri farm boy saw no reason to “give away in a $2 book what he was successfully selling to thousands of people as a $75 lecture course,” his 14-week series at the Dale Carnegie Institute of Effective Speaking and Human Relations. Simon & Schuster executive Leon Shimkin had attended the series and had been so impressed, he broached the idea of a book with Carnegie. Eventually, Shimkin prevailed, convincing him to write it.
“How to Win Friends and Influence People” was first published in October 1936 and would go on to become one of the first best-selling self-help books ever, selling more than 30 million copies. It’s quoted on Twitter and shows up constantly in interviews with business titans (a 15-year-old Warren Buffet discovered the book on his grandfather’s shelf and found that all of the book’s advice helped his social life in high school, according to biographer Alice Schroeder, who writes about it in “The Snowball”). The book was even included in a 2016 Library of Congress exhibit called “America Reads,” which celebrated 65 books by American authors that had a profound effect on American life.
So why does its popularity endure more than 80 years after its publication?
Nothing in the book is particularly shocking or unconventional; there’s no gimmick to it, just really sound advice and a pretty keen understanding of human nature “A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language,” writes Carnegie, who changed his name from its original spelling, Carnagey, to encourage association with the (unrelated) Gilded Age Carnegie family. Other tidbits include avoiding criticizing others —“Criticisms are like homing pigeons. They always return home” — and on taking a gentle approach even in times of trial, “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain,” he writes, “And most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving ... Success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint.”